Chris

Airwindows is one guy: me! I am an audio hacker and computer programmer from way back. I seek only to continue my life up here in Vermont, inventing things and putting them onto the internet, sometimes for free and sometimes for pay. My hope is that people richer than me (i.e. most people) don't rob me. My other hope is for another cup of Aeropress. One out of two ain't bad!

DigitalBlack2 is meant to be the ultimate gate for djent or anything staccato.

It can be set up to be ridiculously fast and articulate, with separately settable attack and release thresholds. The reason you can have an ‘on’ threshold lower than the ‘off’ (or ‘gate’) point is, it runs internal timing like DigitalBlack anyway, so you can tell it to open with the on threshold and then it’ll immediately try to close.

While it’s running through its internal timing (which is sensitive to the frequencies passing through it, like DigitalBlack) it passes pure sound without shut-off artifacts. It will not sputter, and it’ll switch off more aggressively if it can (if it’s had mainly highs passing through).

It has to run through to either silence, or go above the off threshold, to stay open: the on threshold is like the ‘hair trigger’ to catch subtleties of attack, while the off threshold is the real gate threshold. Finally, the gate speed is adjustable on DigitalBlack2, on top of the frequency sensitivity: you scale the whole response up or down even though it’s already adaptive to the signal’s wavelengths.

It’s free.

DigitalBlack2 might not be the simplest gate to set, but I think it’s the most high-performance musical noise gate in existence if you can master it. There are more ‘hi-fi’ noise gates for mastering and mixing, but this one is for making things staccato in completely controllable fashion, and delivering sounds with unparalleled aggression. If it does that for you and you know others with similar needs, tell them. Because the thing is, if more people use a gate this good and this sensitive to human performance, it becomes all about your touch and muting. Why not show that off on equal footing?